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I've been looking for a copy of RH 8.0 to download for a 686...and can only find it for 386s...any idea why/where I can find what I want?
Also, I tried to get Mandrake, download page without purchasing..takes me back to the same page. A temporary bug, or what?
Thanks for your help!
Also, I'd like to apologize for my complete inactivity for the last few days, I've been busy repairing a trio of PCs...which I'll talk about in an article I'm planning. "What NOT to Do on PCs"
All the distros come as i386 so it can be installed in any computer after you installed your system them you will have to recompile your kernel or using the new feature automatic update from redhat will download the new kernel and it will compiled for you as a i686
hope this help
:)
Helps a lot, thanks!
If you are interested in processor-specific optimizations, you might want to check out a source-based distro like Gentoo. In Gentoo, everything is compiled directly from source through a wrapper that passes optimized CFLAGS and CXXFLAGS to GCC, so everything right down to ls can be optimized for your processor.
For my Athlon T-Bird, I compile everything with the following flags:
march=athlon-tbird -fomit-frame-pointer -funroll-loops
However, IMO the performance gains from these kinds of optimizations is pretty marginal. Mandrake gets a lot of good press for being i586 optimized, but the difference really isn't noticable in day-to-day computing. The only way you will ever really notice it is if you do some benchmarking. Where you will really see performance gains in compiling is in the USE flag, where you can tell the compiler to omit certain options that you may not need. Since I use Gnome and not KDE, I compile everything with the "USE='-qt'" flag so that qt functionality will not be compiled into my apps. And on my firewall machine I use "USE='-X'" since I don't run X on a server.
Probably more than you wanted to know, but if you are interested in this sort of thing, it can be a lot of fun to play with these flags.